>Well, look.. The whole point was to illustrate the absurdity of the position. >You simply cannot give of this world's goods in any fashion that will cause >them to increase. There's this little issue of creating wealth. <g>

My whole point was, there is no point in trying to prevent piracy. If that were possible, MS would be doing it. The value of source code is really only in context, especially when it comes to something like FoxPro. I can emulate anyone's programs simply by studying what the program does, not specifically how, and I don't need ReFox to do it. Anyone who would go through the trouble of decompiling a Fox app to get to the logic behind it is probably not doing themselves any favors. It would be faster to just look at examples that are currently given away for free. When I lived in Thailand, I was selling a rather large program written in VFP. Other programmers would ask, why don't you protect the source code? My answer was, "Why?" The real work is in putting it all together, in context. If someone wants to steal the entire program and give their CD to a friend, you can't prevent that. This, I suspect, is the real reason behind MS's move toward subscription software which will eventually lead to online access/use only. VFP developers can also use a form of subscription if they think it is called for.

The piracy that goes on in poor countries, call them "morally poor" if you like, gets down to people changing serial numbers with a binary editor.

Look at it this way, if someone needs code, they can just log in here and insist on specific cut and paste working examples with no errors.

(best way possible too) ;)

PS. Actually, I'm waiting for Mike Stewart to hire me as the SouthEast Asia VFP software piracy police.